Nine Inch Nails

This 1994 release confirmed what long-time fans had already known -- Trent Reznor was a huge talent. With an eye finely tuned to detail, he created an album that somehow managed to eke into the mainstream. "Closer" received major airplay, despite (or because of) the brutal imagery. This album remains a defining sound in the music of the '90s.

Nine Inch Nails achieve a new kind of loud on The Downward Spiral: accessible hard-rock
moves overlaid with a scrim of electronic racket, white noise, screams, the kind of
blown-speaker rattle that seems to use the limitations of crappy stereo equipment the way
that Hendrix riffed on the distortion that howled from overdriven Marshall stacks. It's a new
frontier in rock & roll: music that pins playback levels far into the red. You have o... More >

Musically, Hieronymus Bosch as postindustrial atheist; lyrically, Transformers as kiddie porn ("Heresy," "Reptile") (Grade - **)